Hey Geg, et al!
My understanding about getting Krystal to take wordclock is that this was one of the original problems noted about Motorola, etc., and that it just never will be able to do it.
HOWEVER, it is certainly easy to make Krystal sync to incoming digital via the AES port, and this is a perfectly good substitute. I am always doing this with my Alesis Masterlink, by the way, and it makes an enormous difference in the resultant playback sound.
My two MTU systems are still sitting on a shelf in the barn unused, though I took the CD burner out of one of them to install in my youngest son's newly purchased used AW4416, which does work amazingly well, as you suggest, Geg. I got him up and running and doing automated music mixes in a single day on the thing.
I have had occasion in the last year to do some critical listening and comparisons with newer stuff to my last couple of CDs mastered on MicroEditor with MicroCD from 24bit projects, and have refined what I think about that....have made comparisons with the old 16 bits-all-the-way-through stuff, too.
Although I still find the MicroCD dither-free bit reduction to retain most of the frequency response pallette of the original file, I also find it to have a bit of a "veiled" sound overlaid. When starting with 16bit files, this additionally veiling does not happen.......But I am still struggling with how to bring ANY 24 bit file to a CD without destroying it.
I am still using Wavelab with Waves plugins to achieve this most of the time, but still have to experiment heavily with each product to get it to sound the way I want.......A big time mastering engineer that has been mastering some major label albums for a good friend of mine seems to achieve this simply by doing all processing in the analogue domain, and having superior converters on either end of the process.
The importance of conversion has really been hammered into me over the last couple of years. Luckily, I have found what I consider to be the ultimate, perfect D to A converter, and now have that in my monitoring chain so that I feel I always know what I am hearing while working on anything......This is the converter built in to the Dangerous Music "The Monitor" monitoring/switching unit. It syncs instantly to anything you switch it to, so you can be working with multiple sources at different sampling rates that are not clocked together and make instant A-B comparisons.
This has been a godsend. Before having it, I was going through enormous contortions making sure the monitoring section in my DM2000 was clocking correctly to whatever I was listening to.......And the accuracy of the Dangerous converters is vastly superior to anything else I have heard. The result is that when I listen to my old mixes, the stuff which was always good still sounds just fine, but the stuff that had some problems that I could not quite fix now sounds TERRIBLE and I now know exactly what I should have done........Something about the phase accuracy across the whole spectrum.
Unfortunately, Dangerous is not making A to D converters, so that is a whole other can of worms I am still thinking about......but at least now I can trust what I am hearing all the time.
I am still using Wavelab as my primary editor/mastering environment, but I am about to enter the DAW multitrack world a little more forcefully than I had ever intended. This will mostly enhance some long distance production and music making that I have started in on......and will probably force me, kicking and screaming, into the Pro Tools HD world.
I am, just now, finishing up the album that was tracked at NPR 3 years ago on PT HD, and I have also been doing some long distance consulting with a friend for his major label mixing on his brand new PT HD system using a Dangerous 2 Bus for external analogue summing.......In both instances, I have to say that there is just something about the PT HD files that I do not like. It is hard to define....some kind of low level dithering cloud or something, but it is there. I have not had the opportunity to really dive into the use or setup of a PT HD system, so I don't know if I can find ways to use it that avoid this. I do know that every time a file makes a trip through the system, dithering is added, so maybe that is what is going on.....but that should not have affected the NPR files.....who knows.
I am still very, very happy with my DM2000. I bought an 02R96 for my live work, and have found that it sounds almost identical to the DM2k as long as you keep it in the digital domain.......The converters in the monitor section sound awful compared to those in the DM2k, however, which is how this whole quest for converters started with me......I actually ended up dropping money on the other Dangerous switching/monitoring box (Monitor ST with DAC ST) so that I could have the same kind of confidence in what I was hearing when I was out on gigs. Big money, but big relief, too.
I still have 7 DA78s and 2 MX2424s, but I have been using the HD24s almost exclusively for all my live work. Both of my machines have the XR converter upgrade, and I have come to think that they actually sound quite good. I used them in tandem to record a festival in NY last summer, and they worked flawlessly in that environment.....Although it seems as if Alesis is getting ready to discontinue them (the supply of EC-2 converter upgrades is drying up completely), they are simple enough, and there is enough support coming out of the forum, that I think they will stay useful for quite a while. One guy on the forum is making caddies that take SATA drives, and another writes fabulous software that allows file transfers, repairs damaged files, etc.
The only other choice out there seems to be the X48, which has some other nice features, but a few drawbacks, as well........Even though it is priced very fairly, I can't justify the expenditure for it at the moment...not enough work.
Anyway, I am just sort of dawdling along. Just got the last kid out of the house, and my oldest just made me a grandfather, so this generally takes the front seat and the audio stuff sits back a bit.
I have been trying to branch out a bit more into video editing.....I produced a Blu Ray presentation for my brother at NAMM in January, and I am finding all the hi def stuff pretty exciting.
I may try to crank up one of my MTU rigs to salvage some files from an old album.....If so, you guys are sure to hear from me, because I can't remember anything about how to use them.....it has just been too long.
....good hearing from everyone. Don't hesitate to contact me directly:
mudsmith@earthlink.net 304-261-9426